Jared Serbu reports.

But agreement or no, the Air Force is telling its program managers they shouldn't
expect to see one nickel's worth of relief to their acquisition programs.

Amid ongoing budget uncertainty, the service has instructed its acquisition
offices that they should plan to execute their programs at the same level they
were funded during fiscal 2013's sequestered budget.

Officials don't yet know the impact of the budget deal on DoD with precision, said
Lt. Gen. Charles Davis, the military deputy to the Air Force's assistant secretary
for acquisition.

For now, they're only expecting it to reduce the Air Force's sequestration bill by
a few billion dollars. And any relief that comes will be directed to restoring
some of the military readiness that was degraded during the
first year of the cuts as the military was forced to halt training exercises and
reduce flying hours.

"As we have to make further trades across whatever numbers we're given, it really
is going to come from our investment program," Davis said Thursday at the annual
Air Force IT day hosted by AFCEA's Northern Virginia chapter. "And even within
those investment programs, a large chunk of that money is already decided and
already blocked off from being able to use for other activities. And believe it or
not, there's a lot of folks out there who think they know how the Air Force should
spend its budget a lot better than the Air Force does. That creates a unique
challenge."

Davis said the limited decision space within the overall budget means that
acquisition in the Air Force is now a zero sum game.

"Nobody brings a new idea or a new program to the table without it coming from an
existing program," he said. "Nobody gets to go to Congress and say, 'I really wish
you'd tell the Air Force they have to keep this' without something else being
taken off the table. That just can't happen anymore. Everything we bring back in
or add, something has to go. That's how we're building our budgets right now. For
that reason, any redundant or excess capabilities are something we just can't
afford by any stretch of the imagination."

At the same time, the Air Force says it can't afford to take a holiday on new
procurement right now. After more than a decade of high tempo operations, the
service says it desperately needs to recapitalize an aging fleet and tackle other
high-priority areas like science and technology.

Davis said that means the Air Force's only choice is to reduce the cost drivers in
its procurement programs.

"So we've asked all our program managers to tell us what that flat line means and
how they're going to execute that. That means we have to curb our requirements, we
have to manage what we want for technology, we have to be very judicious about the
capabilities we ask for," he said. "And we need to make sure industry tells us
what the costs of these requirements truly are going to be based on how they work
that program. And if we can make some change to that requirement because there's a
very steep knee in the curve somewhere, we need to hear that from you. You need to
tell us 'no' more often, and we need to listen. That's something we're not very
good at."

Davis said there are a "vast number" of ways in which the Air Force can get lower
prices for products and services without cutting into industry profits or reducing
the amount of capability it ultimately gets.

For starters, he said the Air Force needs to pay more attention to designing
procurements that reduce the cost of the solicitation process on both the
government and industry side.

"One thing we're seeing, whether it's a product program or a services program, the
proposal process to get us to the point where we actually obligate money is too
long, it's too expensive, it's too cumbersome, it's too painful," he said. "The
Air Force traditionally loses somewhere around $600 million a year from our
budgets every year, because the money expires before we can obligate it. That's
for a lot of reasons. The program maybe slips or gets canceled or has a schedule
that stretches out. But a lot of that money gets lost because we take way too long
to get it on contract. That hurts the industry, that hurts the military, and it's
something we just have to pay attention to."